When students are satisfied with their cut-outs and edges, they can glue the project down. / Ginger Huebner/Special to WNC Parent

Written by

Ginger Huebner, WNC Parent columnist

Sometimes the simplest projects can engage students the longest! I recently worked on positive/negative designs with a group of middle school students. Typically, I have a large variety of materials set out to talk about before we begin our lesson. The students arrive and immediately come to check out all that I have put out. But on this day, I only had a pile of black paper, a pile of white paper, scissors and glue sticks. As you can imagine, the students were super curious what we were going to do with this small collection of items. Little did they know that they would get so enthralled!

1. Begin by cutting a shape out of the edge of the black paper. It can be a curved edge or sharp edge shape. Do not cut all the way across the paper.

2. Lay the piece down as a mirror image to the edge of the black paper’s edge. Do not glue yet.

3. Cut more shapes. Make them interesting! You can cut one shape out of another too. Keep track of your shapes, but do not glue down yet.

4. When you think you have enough designs cut out, you can begin to glue down. Glue what is left of the black sheet of paper down first in the middle of the white paper.

5. Lay all of your paper cutouts around the edge, matching them with their mirror image cut. If you have multiple cuts, lay these out as well.

6. Glue down!

As I mentioned, the project is very straightforward, but there are some great critical thinking skills built in. The mirroring of the cut shapes (and the shapes within the shapes) really had the students focusing. They were gathering together in groups to help each other figure out how to glue down, etc. Once they completed the works, they were all finding different images in one another’s designs. It is a fun project that can be pulled together quickly and with few materials, but students will love it!